By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Shunning the cricket and going paperless: Carr construes
In his Monday NY Times column, David Carr offers his take on Hollywood studios showing no love to the lowly film cricket, essentially rehashing dozens of recent recaps, 
likely pegged to the $231.8 million worldwide gross Sony leveraged out of The Da Vinci Code. Carr lists three other successes, When a Stranger Calls, Underworld: Evolution and Tyler Perry’s Madea’s Family Reunion, that were not available for preview. 
While the dozen movies not shown to critics this year (namechecked in a raft of articles), have partaken of one form of exploitation or another, Carr opines that “Some movies have been labeled critic-proof, but vast swaths of the industry now seem interested in heading to the market without being turned over with a pointy stick.” The shift from newsprint to the Internet is a large part of Carr’s case. “Even among adults, the time-honored practice of perusing large-print ads and then checking the fine print for listings has been replaced by clicking on the Web.” Along with the requisite nod in the general direction of Snakes on a Plane, and a keen appreciation of how the studios are cutting back on their print advertising budgets, here’s the starkest assertion Carr meanders into:
“[A] new division of Fox Film Entertainment aimed at teenagers, Fox Atomic, will produce eight films a year with a print budget of exactly zero.” Carr partially blames newspapers for the problem, since many “increased rates for movie advertising as other categories fell apart after the dot-com bust [and] may be partly to blame for the prospect of a paperless movie industry.” And what’s a national holiday without quoting Mark Cuban: “I know everyone is trying to make it come true because the cost of print ads could be considered extortion in some jurisdictions.”
